Romantic Circles Reviews

Reviewed by
Nora Crook
Anglia Ruskin University at Cambridge

The Annotated Frankenstein? Most new editions of Frankenstein are annotated now. One thinks of those that have been published or updated in recent years—landmarks such as Charles Robinson’s The Original Frankenstein (2008), Stuart Curran’s wonderfully compendious Romantic Circles hypertext (2009), fine teaching editions (all using the 1818 text) such as Macdonald and Scherf’s Broadview (3rd ed., 2012), Paul Hunter’s Norton (2nd ed., 2012), Judith Wilt’s New Riverside (2003), and not least the Longman (2nd ed. 2007), edited by Wolfson, reviewed in Romantic Circles in 2004.

So what’s new here? It’s fair to describe The Annotated Frankenstein as the offspring of Wolfson’s Longman edition—no hideous progeny, but a very lively and accessible book for the serious (but not necessarily scholarly) reader and a splendid looking monster for the coffee-table. The Longman introduction, rewritten, abridged, and expanded, supplies the groundwork for the introduction to The Annotated Frankenstein. Like its parent, too, this edition has timelines, a history of adaptation on stage and screen, a list for further reading and viewing, and a selection of the 1831 revisions. Some of the 2003/2007 apparatus has been dropped, including contextual material, contemporary reviews, Peake’s 1823 Frankenstein play, Polidori’s The Vampyre, and “Frankentalk” in the popular press. But new features have been brought in, of which the most immediately striking are the illustrations and the expanded critical and informational notes, which form, in effect, a running commentary.

Wolfson and Levao wistfully remark on how “inviting to the eye” (115) the early nineteenth-century three-volume novels were at about 100 words per page, but if The Annotated Frankenstein can’t match that lavishness, the print is beautifully clear, with generous space for the notes, presented as sidenotes; these are distinguished from the text by both a smaller point-size and a sepia tone. The illustrations—nearly 100—have been thoughtfully chosen, and almost all are sufficiently large. There are, of course, the usual portraits of Mary Shelley, her family, Byron, and so on. (A mild demurral: does the spurious Stump portrait, even accompanied by the warning that it is only “long thought to be Mary Shelley,” merit inclusion?) The prints of St. Pancras Churchyard and the Villa Diodati show detail well; a still from the James Whale 1931 Frankenstein is juxtaposed with Fuseli’s Nightmare to illustrate how the first derives from the second. More out-of-the-way illustrations include pages of Godwin’s diary, some of Lynd Ward’s superb wood engravings of 1934, Henry Fuseli’s 1794 Milton Dictating to his Daughter (a voluptuous figure, whose thin red neck-ribbon disturbingly suggests the guillotine as her father’s ghastly sightless eyes roll upward), Rubens’s baroque Prometheus Bound, and Cruikshank’s print of Napoleon’s 1814 dethronement, The Modern Prometheus or Downfall of Tyranny. There is an 1800 map of the walled city of Geneva, showing the three infamous gates that shut inexorably at 10 p.m., sealing poor Justine’s fate. Something that will be completely new to most readers is the reproduction of the title page of the fine Hawkey 1747 edition of Paradise Lost, now at Princeton, inscribed “Mary. W. G. | from Percy B Shelley | June 6. 1815.” Not only does this shed a slender beam on what the Shelleys were up to during this blank period in early June, from which no other documents seem to have survived, but the record of a previous owner, “Lady Savile” (52), supplies a possible additional source for the name of Walton’s sister, Margaret Saville. Furthermore, it is linked to one of the major narratives running through the notes: Frankenstein’s engagement with Milton.

Wolfson and Levao don’t aim at being exhaustive in their annotation, but this is compensated for by expansiveness and cohesion. As well as Milton, topics such as class conflict, the alchemical and scientific background, the unnamed ghosts of Rousseau and Wollstonecraft in the text, parenting, and the significance of names are foregrounded; many notes point out the recurrence of motifs and episodes (the monster collecting wood for “firing,” repeated courtroom and reanimation scenes). A very strong feature is the degree of attention to verbal detail, such as the change from “R. Walton” to “Robert Walton” as a valediction to his sister when Walton believes that he may never return. The editors tease out the numerous occurrences of words that ironically relate to Frankenstein (frankly, frank-hearted, etc.), and the variants on monster and devoted. There is a judicious selection of the alterations made by Percy to Mary’s manuscripts. Even those who believe they know Frankenstein pretty well will catch themselves thinking as they read the notes, “Well, I never noticed that before,” whether it be a submerged allusion to Orlando Furioso or the fact that we never learn what happened to Frankenstein’s one surviving sledge dog. Notes are up-to-date; the identification of Claire Clairmont’s father by Vicki Parslow Stafford in February 2011 has been missed, but the editors have got in a reference to the University of Texas’s research, published September 2011, which found that bright moonlight would have streamed through MWS’s bedroom at 2 a.m. on 16 June 1816 (342), thus supporting her 1831 account.
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Reviewed by
Diego Saglia
University of Parma, Italy

Although published six years apart, these two volumes belong in the same multifaceted critical mosaic. Both studies address the distinctive concerns which have been central to Susan Wolfson’s critical practice since the 1980s—her preoccupation with gender, her focus on literary form, and her indefatigable search for an increasingly detailed, as well as historically attuned, approach to the stylistic materiality of literary works. As with her previous works, these books require us to read intensively into texts, and we cannot escape this demand as we gradually explore their largely shared literary terrain: Hemans and Byron, mostly, but also Wollstonecraft, the Wordsworths and Keats. Wollstonecraft, in particular, plays a major role in Wolfson’s presentation of her argument in the earlier Borderlines, and its discussion of the continuities and discontinuities within Romantic-period gender debates between the 1790s and the 1830s.

Both books perform a series of distinctive critical gestures to which the author has accustomed us over the years. They stand on solid, clearly laid out theoretical and methodological foundations, which Wolfson constantly tests, revises and updates. One of the mainstays in these volumes is, of course, the neo-formalist agenda that Wolfson has been promoting through such contributions as Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (1997) and “Reading for Form” (MLQ, 2007). Both books present repeated instances of what may be defined as an invigorating form of wrestling with different intersecting textual layers. In addition, these books convey a general impatience with established, conventional “Eng Lit” stylistic registers and lexicon. This translates into a penchant for neologisms which never allows us to sit back into the lull of ready-made phrases. In fact, some of these neologisms may not be to everyone’s liking, but they undoubtedly contribute to Wolfson’s corrective critical approach.

These volumes also share common structural features. Borderlines is divided into an introductory chapter; a section on women (Felicia Hemans; the “Masculine Woman”; Maria Jane Jewsbury); one on men (Byron and Keats); and a final coda on sex in souls. Romantic Interactions presents an introductory chapter; a section on women and poetry (Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Smith); one on the “two Wordsworths,” that is, on William’s and Dorothy’s “interactions”; and a third on Byron and those interactions in which he took part directly (in his own life and works), and those through which he influenced the lives and works of other (especially female) authors.

Wolfson locates both volumes within the narrative of her own development and growth as a critic. And more explicitly so in the preface to Borderlines, where she places herself and her book within the critical trajectory that gradually led to the renovation of Romantic-period scholarship in the US and Britain from the early 1980s on. This volume, in particular, makes plain Wolfson’s intention to take stock of this itinerary and reflect on its origins, current status, and further evolutions. Taking up the cumbersome inheritance of Romantic-period gender criticism in order to set it on a new course, Borderlines paints a panorama of interrelations between “he-texts” and “she-texts”. It delineates a map of shifting gender categories in order to cast new light on their textual manifestations and cultural significance. Wolfson’s aim is to capture the formally specific coordinates of these categories—their being-in-the-text—that enable us to perceive their presence and agency in their times, yet also to verify their continuing activity in our own. In this respect, Wollstonecraft stands at the beginning of a tradition of debate that her works continued to enrich well after the waning of 1790s radicalism. And Wolfson’s reconstruction and discussion of later reprises of Wollstonecraft is undoubtedly one of the most striking and valuable offerings in this book. Readers will be particularly delighted to find a chapter on the brilliant and combative Maria Jane Jewsbury, one of the most fascinating of Wollstonecraft’s disciples, as well as one of the most unjustly sidelined writers and intellectuals in the later Romantic period.
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Reviewed by
Susan J. Wolfson
Princeton University

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” That may be, as Keats’s ironizing odist insists, all we know on earth, and all we need to know, but the tautology is as enigmatic as it is alluring. And so the dust jacket of Stanley Plumly’s extraordinary biography reads, in small print at the top, a personal biography, then, more largely declared, Posthumous Keats. But the title page within inverts the order: Posthumous Keats, a personal biography. Which came first, the personalizing of a biography that, by generic agreement, is supposed to be about the other person, the biographized? Or Posthumous Keats, an epithet that feels like a personal biography, even though the poet-biographer outlives poet-Keats, who dies not even a third of the way into his twenty-sixth year, by decades–more than twice and half Keats’s mortal span?

What is “personal” about this? Is it the persona of “Keats”—the mask for thinking as Keats in camelion sympathy? Is it “personal” in the sense of relating to or being affected as a Plumly-private individual, in the persona of a public biographer? Is it a reciprocal relationship, a personal interviewing? Is it an intense engagement in one’s person, belonging to oneself, and self-directed? A personal biography plays in all these registers, with a Keatsian flexibility of imagination. To reverse Michael Corleone, writing Posthumous Keats was not business, it was personal, so Plumly-personal that the impulse seems simultaneous with wanting to think hard about what it was to be Keats, who in his mortal body of less than 10,000 days on earth had a lifetime of mortal experience: the death of both parents, a beloved brother, the loss of another brother to America; the heartbreak of a romance that was everything and nothing, all absorbing and fated to go nowhere; the heartbreak of an adored friend whose limitations couldn’t help but betray Keats in his last half year of life, abandoning him to a foreign clime and a bewildered acquaintance.

Just a month into his twenty-sixth year, on 30 November 1820, with less than three months left of life, Keats writes to this fugitive friend, Charles Brown:

I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence. God knows how it would have been–but it appears to me– however, I will not speak of that subject.¹

This letter, the muse of Plumly’s project, is a formation in striking syntax, its “having past” tensing the expected “passed” into a pained epitaphic sigh (what Plumly terms a “posthumous tense” [294]), in relay with the persistent, even insistent, present tense “I am leading” and that “I have an habitual feeling”–as if always on the pulse, and all sensations summed in that present absence, absent presence of the stunning oxymoron, “posthumous existence.” It’s a diminishing existence instead of a life, at once agonized by a prospect, now only hypothetical, of “how it would have been,” and pained into a tenacious sensation of presence–“it appears to me”–a relay into this life turned a ghost of itself, then an insistent speaking of what the will says it won’t do: “I will not speak of that subject.” Like patience, to prevent that murmur, “posthumous Keats” is oxymoron turned into expressive syntax–Keats’s own poetic forte of unheard melodies and cold pastoral. Keats writes in both a refusal to pain himself and Brown, and a refusal to decline to speak the refusal. Pain is never done. And so he ends his letter, wrenchingly:

Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as far as you can guess; and also a note to my sister–who walks about my imagination like a ghost–she is so like Tom. I can scarcely bid you good-bye, even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.
God bless you!
JOHN KEATS

George, Tom, sister (Fanny), Brown: all were, in effect, ghosts by this point of existence, and so the posthumous past tense in the antonym of eulogy: “I always made an awkward bow”–what Christopher Ricks has termed the least awkward bow ever made. Even the tense is curious. Rollins gives it as this past-reflective (Keats Circle 2: 86), and so does Milnes (2: 84), but one reader of the manuscript thinks the verb is still present, and not posthumous: “I always make an awkward bow” (KC 2: 86n). The ambiguity is the perfect oxymoron, hovering, as Coleridge would say, between possibilities, between, even, plausibilities. Keats performs to an audience that is only imagination, in a formality that feels like a gracious haunting, a leave-taking of something already left, and slightly, poignantly self-parodic, another Keatsian performative forté.
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Reviewed by
R. Paul Yoder
University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Each volume in the Cambridge Companion series provides a sort of snapshot of the state of the art concerning its given subject at the time of its publication, and this is certainly the case with the Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Morris Eaves has put together an excellent collection of overview essays on Blake’s contexts and works. After Eaves’ Introduction, the book is divided unevenly into two parts: “Perspectives” and “Blake’s Works.” All essays in both parts include endnotes and suggestions for further reading. The point of the essays is not so much to make new arguments as to synthesize the body of critical knowledge into a useful companionable form, and in this the volume succeeds quite well. The only glaring omission from the collection is a discussion of Blake and gender, a difficult issue for which a summary essay, if not a true synthesis, would be especially useful.

Eaves’s Introduction establishes the metaphor of a journey of exploration for reading Blake. Eaves readily acknowledges the difficulty of Blake’s work and the strangeness of what passes for “meaning” there: “The basic strategy behind this Cambridge Companion is to respond to the difficulties with a variety of critical and historical explanations from several perspectives which seem to offer the most hope of catching Blake in the act of meaning something we can understand” (1). He juxtaposes the “simplifications” often used to make Blake more accessible to the “complications” that must be recognized to enter more fully into Blake’s world and work. Eaves asserts that Blake was “fundamentally resistant” to the “specialization” that underlies the social routines of “rationalization, scientific thinking, professionalization, industrialization, commercialization, institutionalization, modernization” (7). Perhaps Eaves’s most suggestive comment is that the “underlying problem of recognition is at the heart of Blake’s difficulties then [in his own time] and for us now” (9). That is, Blake’s readers in his own time could not quite determine just what he was about, and in our time, readers may not recognize the social context or traditions of thought in which he worked. Moreover, the problem of recognition is also thematic for Blake, for as Eaves puts it, “Blake’s epic plots depict a complex process of masking and subsequent confusion and misery, followed by equally complex unmasking, the identification of negations posing as metaphors, and the restoration of the true (original) links of identification” (11).

The “Perspectives” section of the collection provides a good introduction to Blake and to Blake studies. Aileen Ward’s “factual narrative” (35) seeks to “disentangl[e] as much as possible” Blake’s life from the legend (19). Nevertheless, she is selective about which facts and which legends. She recounts the illiteracy of Blake’s wife and the story of how Blake’s dead brother, Robert, revealed to him the idea of illuminated printing. She mentions the “unconscious homosexuality” of Blake’s patron William Hayley, but not Hayley’s supposed sexual advances toward Mrs. Blake. Whatever the final status of these gray areas, Ward’s summary of Blake’s life is very good, and her paragraphs on Blake’s ideas concerning the Last Judgment and on his illustrations to Dante, “Blake’s most drastic act of reinterpretation” (33), are excellent.

Joseph Viscomi uses the “Printing House in Hell” from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as a guide for describing Blake’s printing process. Drawing from his own earlier work, Viscomi debunks, or at least qualifies, many common misconceptions about Blake’s work. For example, whereas it was once a given that each copy of Blake’s illuminated books was a meticulously unique work of art, Viscomi points out, “Making each impression exactly repeatable … was not really possible when working by hand with an assistant. While each copy produced was a unique work of art, most impressions printed and colored at the same time do not differ very much … Making each impression very different would have required more labor and time” (55-6). Viscomi also reminds us that Blake’s illuminated books represent relatively brief and sporadic periods in the artist’s long productive life: the books were “produced as fine ‘limited editions.’ They were not invented to secure financial independence, and they didn’t … [The books] were mostly underwritten by his commercial work” (60).
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